Automated segmentation of optic disc and optic cup in fundus images for glaucoma diagnosis

The vertical Cup-to-Disc Ratio (CDR) is an important indicator in the diagnosis of glaucoma. Automatic segmentation of the optic disc (OD) and optic cup is crucial towards a good computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system. This paper presents a statistical model-based method for the segmentation of the optic disc and optic cup from digital color fundus images. The method combines knowledge-based Circular Hough Transform and a novel optimal channel selection for segmentation of the OD. Moreover, we extended the method to optic cup segmentation, which is a more challenging task. The system was tested on a dataset of 325 images. The average Dice coefficient for the disc and cup segmentation is 0.92 and 0.81 respectively, which improves significantly over existing methods. The proposed method has a mean absolute CDR error of 0.10, which outperforms existing methods. The results are promising and thus demonstrate a good potential for this method to be used in a mass screening CAD system.